As for Sir Francis's personal character, even Mackenzie's biographer allows that he was frank, kindly and generous in an unusual degree. That he won the entire esteem of so many men of whom all Canadians of whatever party are proud—such men as Chief Justice Robinson, Bishop Strachan, Chief Justices Macaulay, Draper and McLean, Sir Allan N. McNab, Messrs. Henry Ruttan, Mahlon Burwell, Jno. W. Gamble and many others, I hold to be indubitable proof of his high qualities and honest intentions. Nobody can doubt that had he been sent here to carry out responsible government, he would have done it zealously and honourably. But he was sent to oppose it, and, in opposing it, he simply did his duty.
A gentleman[9] well qualified to judge, and who knew him personally, has favoured me with the following remarks apropos of the subject, which I have pleasure in laying before my readers:
"As a boy, I had a sincere admiration for his [Sir Francis's] devoted loyalty, and genuine English character; and I have since learnt to respect and appreciate with greater discrimination his great services to the Crown and Empire. He was a little Quixotic perhaps. He had a marked individuality of his own. But he was as true as steel, and most staunch to British law and British principle in the trying days of his administration in Canada. His loyalty was chivalrous and magnetic; by his enlightened enthusiasm in a good cause he evoked a true spirit of loyalty in Upper Canada, that had well-nigh become extinct, being overlaid with the spirit of ultra-radicalism that had for years previously got uppermost among our people. But Upper Canada loyalty had a deep and solid foundation in the patriotism of the U. E. Loyalists, a noble race who had proved by deeds, not words, their attachment to the Crown and government of the mother land. These U. E. Loyalists were the true founders of Upper Canada; and they were forefathers of whom we may be justly proud—themselves 'honouring the father and the mother'—their sovereign and the institutions under which they were born—they did literally obtain the promised reward of that 'first commandment with promise,' viz.: length of days and honour."
William Lyon Mackenzie was principally remarkable for his indomitable perseverance and unhesitating self-reliance. Of toleration for other men's opinions, he seems to have had none. He did, or strove to do, whatsoever he himself thought right, and those who differed with him he denounced in the most unmeasured terms. For example, writing of the Imperial Government in 1837, he says:
"Small cause have Highlanders and the descendants of Highlanders to feel a friendship for the Guelphic family. If the Stuarts had their faults, they never enforced loyalty in the glens and valleys of the north by banishing and extirpating the people; it was reserved for the Brunswickers to give, as a sequel to the massacre of Glencoe, the cruel order for depopulation. I am proud of my descent from a rebel race; who held borrowed chieftains, a scrip nobility, rag money and national debt in abomination. . . . Words cannot express my contempt at witnessing the servile, crouching attitude of the country of my choice. If the people felt as I feel, there is never a Grant or Glenelg who crossed the Tay and Tweed to exchange high-born Highland poverty for substantial Lowland wealth, who would dare to insult Upper Canada with the official presence, as its ruler, of such an equivocal character as this Mr. what do they call him—Francis Bond Head."
Had Mackenzie confined himself to this kind of vituperation, all might have gone well for him, and for his followers. People would only have laughed at his vehemence. The advocacy of the principle of responsible government in Canada would have been and was taken up by Orangemen, U. E. Loyalists, and other known Tories. Ever since the day when the manufacture of even a hob-nail in the American colonies was declared by English statesmen to be intolerable, the struggle has gone on for colonial equality as against imperial centralization. The final adoption of the theory of ministerial responsibility by all political parties in Canada, is Mackenzie's best justification.
But he sold himself in his disappointment to the republican tempter, and justly paid the penalty. That he felt this himself long before he died, will be incontestably shown by his own words, which I copy from Mr. Lindsey's "Life of Mackenzie," vol. ii., page 290:
"After what I have seen here, I frankly confess to you that, had I passed nine years in the United States before, instead of after, the outbreak, I am very sure I would have been the last man in America to be engaged in it."
And, again, page 291: